President of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan, who is on a working visit to Rostov-on-Don, Russia, talking to the local Armenian community representatives said that the main reason why the Armenian-Turkish protocols ratification process is suspended is that currently Turkey is not ready to ratify the protocols, and Turkey advances new preconditions to justify the failure of the process.

“Currently Turkey attempts to invade a sphere, I mean the process of Nagorno-Karabakh conflict settlement, where it evidently has nothing to do. At the moment, we have nothing to negotiate about with an unreliable and untrustworthy partner that periodically breaks our preliminary arrangements,” said Sargsyan, according to his press service. “I am sure you remember my thoughts, ideas and concerns, which I voiced here in Rostov-on-Don during my pan-Armenian tour. Time has shown that we, on our side, had done the maximum to open the last closed border in Europe, but Turkey is not ready for it. As for the Nagorno-Karabakh issue, then we have obviously voiced that we are not going to bargain with anyone the right of the Nagorno-Karabakh people to self-determination.”

Rostov-on-Don was one of the five stops on Sargsyan’s weeklong Diaspora tour in early October (which also included Paris, New York, Los Angeles and Beirut) to discuss his yearlong rapprochement effort with Turkey with the far-flung Armenian communities abroad. The trips were made shortly before Armenia and Turkey signed two protocols in Zurich, Switzerland, on October 10 envisaging normalization of historically strained relations and opening of the border between the two neighbors that has stayed closed since 1993. Sargsyan formally suspended the ratification of the protocols in the Armenian parliament in April, citing Ankara’s failure to honor commitments regarding an unconditional process.